Softscrubb, my wife is an ELL kindergarten teacher. From my experiences in seeing her classroom in action, and talking with her, her students, and their families, I know that some of your comments about ELL are inaccurate.
First of all, the term ESL (English as a second language) was dropped several years ago, replaced with ELL (English language learners). The problem with the old term was the word "second". For many of these kids, English is actually a third, fourth, or higher ordinal language.
Secondly, these classes are not "designed to teach subjects in the 'native' language of students". This would not be possible, seeing that many of these classes have as many different native tongues as there are students in the class. (My wife's two classes alone this past year had 53 students with 18 different native languages.) Instead, these classes teach the students how to speak and read ENGLISH, but at a learning pace that is more rapid than native English speakers.
When someone grows up speaking English at home, they are spending several years of childhood (before ever attending school) learning both the English language and the concepts of sentence structure. (They don't know that they're learning sentence structure--they aren't learning the word 'noun' and 'verb'--but, for example, they are learning the differences between a 'thing' and 'doing something'.) Similarly, kids who grow up speaking some other language learn that language, but they also learn the concepts of sentence structure in that language. ELL classes and teachers therefore work to help the students learn English more quickly, by leveraging the fact that they already have knowledge of sentence structure, and just need to apply that knowledge to English.
ELL teachers rarely know the native tongues of their students. Through working with her students, my wife has learned to count to ten in about half a dozen languages, and has learned several phrases in both Hmong and Somali (the most common native languages in the Twin Cities). But she and her colleagues are teaching nothing to the kids in those languages--everything is centered on English.
People who think that ELL classes are encouraging the use of non-English languages in schools (and elsewhere) could not be more incorrect. For those who feel that English should be the main/only language used in business, schools, and elsewhere in this country, ELL classes are a large part of the solution--not part of the problem.
--Bill Verkuilen
